For the purpose of our application, the whole creating process was driven by Goal-Directed Design (GDD), a design process created by Alan Cooper. GDD is a design process focused on understanding the user’s behaviors, goals, needs and motivations. When creating TAP, we followed the GDD method by the following five phases of the process: Research, Modeling, Requirements, Framework and Refinement.

After our research period, our team transitioned to modeling who our users were to help give us more specific goals for the different types of users we'd have in our app. This helped us in the requirements phase as this gave us more accurate needs of our userbase. Lastly, we designed our first prototype and then tested it with our fellow classmates to help refine the design.

To begin with our research, we conducted a kick-off meeting designed to get the team to set up the foundation of the project goals and purposes.
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A kickoff meeting is one of the first meetings as a design team would have with stakeholders. This meeting is where we, as a team can set up general concept and project goals with stakeholders. During this phase, the designers have opportunities to ask stakeholders initial key questions and expectations they may have on the project.

Since this project was being completed within an Interaction Design I class, we did not have actual stakeholders that would in most cases be present in a traditional kick-off meeting setting to discuss the primary goals of a project. Therefore, we constructed our own problem statement and assumption statement about our potential users.

It's important to to get a baseline understanding of the potential user. We discussed on the method that best suits the research objectives, target audience, and available resources.  

The competitive audit is used to compare existing versions, prototypes, or competitors of a product. This section of GDD will allow our team to understand what makes other social media platforms different from others by examining the features they offer and the capabilities they have. This involved comparing our top competitors to determine gaps in the market that our product could address. By analyzing these applications, we found how our application could stand out in the market.

We focused our competitive audit on three major competitors: Viper SmartStart, OnStar Remote Link, and MoboKey. While the Viper smartwatch has unique features such as providing car status, parking location, among other features, its major downfall requires a separate device in order to connect to a car. In addition, it requires a subscription in order to utilize the car control. While OnStar provides personalization and a point reward system, its major fallback is the lack of a universal application and a required plan with the temperature control feature. Lastly, MoboKey is a smartphone app that allow users to control multiple cars, provide parking location, and share key option. However, the smartphone app does not come with a smartwatch that can be controlled from your smartwatch.

After research about the domain and product but before user research, a design team must meet with stakeholders again to reaffirm their business goals. Some information to gather in a stakeholder interview that they could not discuss in the kickoff meeting would be product vision, budget, schedule, technical restraints, business goals, and the perception of users.

Since this project is a university class project, we did not have any real stakeholders to interview. Instead, we imagined what a stakeholder might have discussed with our team about the application. They would reaffirm that they want to make an application that is easy to use and can connect many people together. However, they would also be concerned with how to reach the application’s domain and how to earn revenue from the services provided by the application.

A persona is a descriptive model that is based on the goals and behaviors of real users. The purpose of creating a persona is to minimize subjective assumptions and understand what users really need so that we know how to better serve different types of users.

Based on the research results and the affinity mapping, we ended up with two types of personas.

After conducting the usability testing sessions, we further collected additional data from our interviewees on their thought process and attitudes about the smartwatch overall design. Through this, we were able to walk away with insightful information on the functionality of the smartwatch app which helps our team to develop better solutions in order to meet the user's goals.